I ran as fast as I could but I never managed to step on a varmint.
I wasn't trying - that is, I was trying to run fast, but I was pretty much pretending about wanting to stomp one of the palm-sized fuzzy guys that scampered and glided around the field while I was training. It would be unpleasant in so many ways. I'd probably trip and it'd get grossly squashed and all the other girls on the track team thought varmints were cute so they'd be upset. Some girls would tuck foreclaws into their jerseys and wear them around like good luck charms for going over hurdles or aiming at a personal best on the hundred meters. I didn't care for the critters myself. Probably picked it up from my dad, who'd sweep them out the dog door with a pushbroom and swear at them when he thought I wasn't listening. But I didn't want them dead, especially not messily under my foot.
There weren't burrows on the track itself. Somebody'd turn an ankle. If any were ever dug they got patched up before the kids saw them. The varmints boiled up out of holes out among the trees and shrubbery instead, whenever there was activity to watch. Most of the holes hugged the trunks so you'd have to be trying to put your toes down one while you were picking fruit.
When Coach told me to take a break that was what I went and did, slow to a jog and then a walk and drift to the blueberries. Eye-level was as always a bit sparse, but I wanted to lie down anyway, so I rolled under a bush, looked up at the leaves, and ate directly from the branch.
"Kelly?"
I rolled out, still chewing. It was one of the school admins. "Yeah-huh?"
"Can I get your help with a bit of a special assignment?"
I sat up. "What kinda special assignment?"
"We have a transfer student. From Tintown."
My jaw didn't drop open, but only because I hadn't swallowed all my blueberries. I knew the words "transfer student", but it wasn't the kind of thing that happened in Hollow Grove. Sometimes somebody new would move in, usually a family that had heard it was a great place to raise kids; sometimes people would move out, mostly young folks who'd just left high school. But nobody just started attending Hollow Grove High when they hadn't been through Hollow Grove Elementary. And nobody had moved in! There hadn't been a housewarming party. I didn't go to every housewarming party, but I heard about them all.
The admin kept talking: "Her name is Amy and she's sixteen. She's staying with a cousin of hers who lives here. She's worried she's going to have a hard time adjusting to Hollow Grove after growing up in Tintown and I think it'd help her a lot to have somebody go take the initiative in getting to know her. And I hear she's interested in taking up running."
"I can do that," I said, pushing myself up to my feet. "Who's her cousin?"
"Ron Sanders, over in Plum Orchard. Oh, and Kelly - outside Hollow Grove, they don't do the Santa thing. Amy does know that you aren't supposed to know yet, but I picked you not just because you're friendly and run track, but also because you're almost old enough to find out about Santa and if she does slip up following the custom there, you'll only be a few months early."
Obviously I knew Santa was not real. Everyone found out Santa was not real by the time they were like, ten, tops. But there was some other thing that we weren't supposed to find out till later than that, and we just said "finding out about Santa" to refer to it, because it was a complicated secret and explaining what it was even about would be too much of a clue. Some secret that was sort of like Santa in some way that I would presumably understand once I was older. It at least seemed to share the "it's more fun to believe the kid version" characteristic. My older sister Rachel got really upset when she turned eighteen, and for a while was seriously thinking about moving to Tintown herself. Kids at school would swap made-up guesses. Like, "Santa is that all bread is made of bugs", or "Santa is that in olden times dogs lived forever". Neither sounded right to me but I didn't have my own guess.
I didn't bother the adults around me about it because sometimes it kind of looked like they might tell me if I asked.
"So you're not getting a grownup to make friends with her because she's not a grownup, but she might Santa me so I should be ready for that?" I said, to make sure I'd gotten the picture.
"That's right. Can I count on you, Kelly?"
I bobbed my head. I didn't super want to be Santa'd early but it sounded like this Amy girl needed somebody and I'd been asked first. "Like now, or after practice?"
"Now; I just got back from talking to her cousin Ron and it's a good time."
So I told Coach, and instead of going around the track again, I lit off at a jog toward Plum Orchard, two radials off from Due North St. starting from the town center (which was where the schools were). I could take the distance in ten minutes, if I went as fast as I could - and I was missing practice to do it, so I pushed, eating up the ground between me and the plum trees.
Everywhere has plum trees - everywhere has all kinds of fruit - but the ones in Plum Orchard are all the same kind, so they all bloom at once and all fruit at once, instead of being the staggered types you'll find one or two of among the apples and pears and peaches in every parklet and along every street. It made the neighborhood especially pretty in springtime. Varmints chased me, gliding between roofs and branches and skittering at my feet. They were faster than me over short stretches but I could keep going longer than any of them; I shook off tired ones as they dove down convenient burrow-tunnels and picked up curious new ones following me in the air and pacing me on the street.
I slowed down, feeling my heart hammer in my ribcage, when I found the orchard and the houses throughout it. Hollow Grove was a small town, but I didn't immediately know which house belonged to Ron Sanders. I started reading mailboxes, warming down with a slow meander through the trees. The plums weren't in fruit right now, but there were plenty of other things to snack on in the understory; I uprooted a few peanuts and started picking them open with my nails while I searched.
The twelfth mailbox I read said RON SANDERS and then underneath, in still-shiny-new paint, AMY TORRES. I dropped my last couple peanuts in a place that looked like it could use a peanut plant and trotted up to the door and rapped on it smartly.
"Just a minute!" called Ron from inside. I bounced on my toes, stretched out my calves a little, and was presently admitted to the house. "It's Kelly, right?" he asked.
"Yeah, I live in Vineyard over the river. Is Amy home?"
"She is! Amy, visitor for you!"
"I don't know anybody!" said a thin voice from up the stairs.
"I'm here to fix that!" I called back. "Hi! I'm Kelly Baker, welcome to Hollow Grove!"
There was a silence, and then down came Amy. She clung to the banister like she'd never been on a flight of stairs before. She was spindly and wan; if I hadn't known for a fact that anybody moving into Hollow Grove needed to stop at the doctor's before they saw anybody else, I'd have sprinted off to get her a medic. She had her black hair cut astonishingly short, except for whimsical two-inch tufts protruding in front of her ears and two more acting as imitation pigtails, and she was wearing obviously temporary clothes, featureless hospital modesty garments that made her look even skinnier than she was.
I didn't want her first impression of me to be that I was rude, though, so I just beamed at her rather than saying something stupid about how she needed to eat an entire loaf of bread. "I wasn't sure what I should show you first on the Hollow Grove grand tour but I can guess now it's gonna be the clothes store. The hospital stuff is just awful, isn't it? You'd think they could at least tie dye it or something!"
Amy looked down at herself. "I don't think tie dye would help... How far is the clothes store?" Her Tintown accent was pretty pronounced but I could understand her.
"Only about a mile and a half. I heard you want to take up running, right? But if you're new that might be a lot to do in one go so we can walk most of it."
She didn't have room to get paler, but her eyes went wider. "That's so far. I don't know if I can even walk the whole way."
"We're borrowing the Smiths' dogcart while Amy builds up her strength," Ron volunteered.
"Wow, okay. How about I jog and you cart, then, and once we've got you some clothes you can walk around in the city center till you need a rest and then you can cart back?" I said.
She nodded, if hesitantly. Ron helped us wrangle the cart and hitch up the Smiths' big dog, Bert. Plum Orchard itself had a lot of tree roots to contend with, but once we got it onto the path proper it wasn't too hard for me to pace Bert and tell Amy which way to steer.
"So what interests you about running?" I asked. Though I was a firm believer that anyone could get into any hobby if they were sincerely aiming to, it didn't look like she could possibly have much history with this one. Why would a track kid have been sent her way instead of a music kid, or an embroidery kid?
"Uh. Before I went to the Hollow Grove doctor I couldn't even walk," said Amy. "Or, like, I could take a few steps, but it hurt a lot and made my legs even worse than they were anyway if I did it too much. So mostly it interests me that - I'll be able to, once I'm in better condition."
"Wow!" Not everybody in Hollow Grove was great at getting around. The Smiths had an extremely old grandma who was the usual dogcart user. But not being able to walk more than a few steps at a time was awful. "Most people in Tintown can walk, right - their track team comes to meets with ours most years and everything."
"Oh, yeah, most people. But there's stuff our doctors -" She shook herself, then corrected the cart's course. "Their doctors. Can't handle. So I wanted to come here and get fixed up, and there's not really a way to... do that and then go back after. Not a good way."
I didn't think any of my questions were polite - why wait till she was sixteen? Why just her and not her parents and siblings too? What had wrecked her legs to begin with? And before I could try to think of some oblique remark that might bring the topic around, a varmint jumped up on Bert's back, and Amy screamed.
"What?" I exclaimed. "What's wrong - it's just a varmint -"
She was taking very deliberate deep breaths, clutching her cart seat with both hands so hard I imagined her fingers would break, calming herself down. "Right. Just a varmint," she agreed faintly.
"Tintown's the wrong climate for them or something?" I asked, reaching for the varmint. I was indifferent between scaring it off the dog and grabbing it to fling it away myself; it picked the former option. "Weren't there any in your cousin's house?"
"No! Oh god, will there be usually?"
"Sure, they get in through the dog doors."
"Cousin Ron doesn't have a dog!"
"The house still has doors for them, and the varmints can use those. My dad doesn't really like 'em either. I'd usually say I don't care for 'em myself but that scream was something, wow!" I laughed. "Are you okay? They usually won't land right on a person unless somebody's been trying to get them to, you don't have to worry they're gonna crawl on you or anything."
"People do that?"
"Sometimes, sure, they're soft and some people reckon they're cute." The trip took a lot longer at a dogcart pace. Bert could probably have picked it up, but Amy looked like she'd rattle right out of the cart if he took a tuft of grass at speed. "They don't bite or anything."
"I guess," said Amy vaguely, now scanning the ground and the trees for the flashing grey-brown shapes. "There are a lot of them."
"I know, right? Probably more underground, that's where they live."
"I knew there were some here but not that they'd be - in the houses, getting super close like that -"
"Maybe you can get your cousin to prop something up against the dog door?" I asked dubiously. "I think it's a tripping hazard or something or my dad would do it but maybe it'd be fine for a week while you're getting settled in."
"I guess I'll, uh, ask him about it." She shivered again. "You don't like them? Nobody's like, oh, Kelly, give them a chance, here, pet this one, they're our friends?"
"No, what?" I laughed. "You don't have to like varmints to fit right in in Hollow Grove, promise. Sometimes I pretend like if I can run fast enough I'll step on one. Like, I wouldn't really, ick, but as an example."
"Maybe one day I will be able to run fast enough to step on one," said Amy solemnly.
"That's the spirit!"
Once we were out of the residential area and on the main drag toward the center of town Bert sped up, Amy proved able to keep her seat, and I ran slightly ahead to show the way to the clothes store. They caught up and I unhitched the dog to let him go play in the nearest park till we needed him for the trip back. Amy followed me, a bit wobbly, through the doors.
"This is a store?" she asked, looking blankly around.
"...yeah?" I said. "Uh, why, what would a store look like in Tintown?"
"More, uh - wait a second, you're not wearing all beige, where do you get your clothes?"
"I get them here!" I pulled my shirt taut; I had it dipdyed green. "One they've got you measured and you've picked a style you like they'll whip it up for you, they should be able to do some of the quick stuff while we go get a salad or something, and then you dye it or take it to somebody who embroiders or whatever you want. I think you probably want like a wrap dress or something? In case your size changes and you want to be able to adjust the belt."
"My size -" She looked at her wrist-bones "I actually haven't heard very good things about Hollow Grove food, do you really expect I'm going to fatten up on salads?"
"I have no idea! But a wrap dress will work either way," I said. "If you aren't used to moving around too much you might wind up hungrier than you're expecting. What's Tintown food like?"
"I mean, sometimes it sucks or there's not enough of it, for sure. If it was so great back home I'd still be there," she shrugged, awkwardly hefting a linen sample. "I like all the fruit growing all over the place fine. But there's stuff that you're not - that you don't have here, or don't have much of. And fruit and salad aren't really high calorie!"
"They're not, they're just for nibbling on through the day. We have bread and meat and stuff, this just happens to be right across the street from the salad place - we could go get omelettes but you'd have to walk farther -"
"Salads are fine. Uh, this seems nice? I like red..."
One of the tailors appeared at her elbow to take her measurements and get her opinion on a range of reds and possible wrap dress styles. Then he vanished again to get her a dress made.
"I was sort of expecting there to be fewer choices," she said, as we walked across the way to get salad.
"Of clothes or of vegetables?" I asked, scanning the menu.
"...both, I guess. There's things we don't have in Tintown but not things that... we can't... ugh, never mind. Do you have a recommendation?"
The salad place was the kind where you just poke a picture of the salad you want and it pops out on a conveyor belt, so there was nobody but me she could be asking. I poked my order, a bowlful of finely shaved ribbons of jicama and cucumber and mango. "I always get the same thing here. If you're not feeling adventurous the melon one is pretty uncomplicated."
She wound up picking carrot sesame, and our bowls rolled out and we took a booth by the window to watch life go by. People were walking their dogs, carrying their toddlers on their shoulders, holding hands with their spouses, pausing between point A and point B to collect apples or pick flowers. Or so I assumed, because that was what I'd normally expect to see, but I was mostly watching Amy. She was making a lot of complicated faces. I was pretty sure she liked the salad. I mostly couldn't decipher the rest of it. She didn't like... something, or at least had really mixed feelings about... dogs? Couples? Babies? Every possibility seemed so unlikely and furthermore also unlikely to be good snack conversation.
"This is good," she said eventually, so at least part of my read was confirmed.
"Mm-hm! Does Plum Orchard do cookouts every night, do you know? I live in Vineyard and we do but I know in some neighborhoods people like making more personalized stuff in their kitchens most of the time."
"I have no idea," said Amy.
"Well, you can come to my place after we get you into your dress and order you a few more outfits, if you want, and in a few hours we'll have a cookout - big grill, lots of stuff on it, fish and pineapple and steaks and chicken and asparagus and everything. Way more filling than a salad. Or, well, it is if you go for the meat, it's not if you eat asparagus all evening."
"That does sound nice," she said. She spoke softly, like she was admitting something embarrassing. "How do I let Cousin Ron know where I'll be since you don't have, uh -" She made a hand motion, then stopped herself, then stopped stopping herself. If Santa was actually a particular way of holding one's hands that was going to be a big anticlimax.
"I think he can probably guess? Like, someone came to your house, and you went off, and then you aren't back right away, you're still with me, right? But even if you did wanna go wander off by yourself why would that be a big deal?"
Amy giggled, tentatively, as though crying instead was still on the table. "I guess it wouldn't. I couldn't exactly get very far. Could I."
"Don't get me wrong, if you see a toddler wandering around alone you should tell somebody, they could fall in the water or wander into a blackberry thicket and get stuck! But you're not a toddler."
"Right. Okay. The cookout sounds - nice. Yeah."
When we were done with our salad we went back across the street to collect her dress. There was a screen for her to change behind, and she picked out a few more to have finished sometime the next day. She wanted to know how many outfits was normal to have, and I said it depended on how often you liked to pick out new clothes. If you only wanted to go shopping every couple of years you might want more than a dozen so they each took longer to wear out. I had fewer, just my school outfit - suitable for running and comfortable to wear all day long - plus a party dress and a set of pajamas, and I updated all my looks every few months when my stuff started to get holes or stains. Then I wound up explaining laundry. Apparently they did it differently in Tintown, and the details, somehow, involved Santa, rather than a Hollow Grove style automatic system that'd return the clothes to you by pneumatic tube after they went down the laundry chute.
By the time we got to my neighborhood the sun was starting to drop behind the western arc of mountain peaks. The firepit glowed in the twilight, and I could smell char in the air from the bird my neighbor was grilling, and there was a smooth hubbub of voices carrying along the aisles created by the grape trellises that lined our neighborhood's center.
"Mom!" I called, when I spotted her. "This is Amy, she's a transfer student!"
The words "transfer student" were still interesting to adults but not as startling as they'd been to me, apparently. Heads turned and everyone smiled and waved at us but Amy did not become the instant center of attention.
So we were free to go between the vines, picking grapes and introducing her to people a few at a time - my parents, and the Jacksons, and the Fengs and the other Fengs who were the grown-up son of the first ones plus his family, and we stopped by the grill to get Amy a chicken thigh - "How is it?" I asked. She'd found the salad so odd, and looked so underfed, I wanted her to like it.
"It's good," she said, with a surprised earnestness I didn't know how to contextualize. She ate the whole thing while it was still piping hot. I took a little longer with my wing, I'd been grazing on growing things all day and I supposed that must be harder if you had limited walking endurance. We meandered through the grape maze, green and red and purple varieties all twining together where their trellises touched, and I showed her everyone's houses, and we swung back by the grill for pineapple.
The varmints didn't like the smoke, but they were numerous enough even just five paces back from the grill, clinging to vines and gliding over our heads. Every time one moved, Amy looked at it. She wasn't getting used to them very quickly. But she refocused on her food and chewed through some of everything, albeit slowing down by the time my dad flipped a serving of rainbow trout onto her plate.
Everybody seemed to be trying not to overwhelm her, with the aggregate result that nobody was acting interested in her at all except me. So it wasn't hard to pull her away from the cookout when we were through with eating. The dog cart would be pretty hard to navigate with in the dark, even if I could run along a well-maintained path under starlight just fine.
Amy sat in her cart, watching my feet and Bert's paws. "It's nice here," she said, out of nowhere, when I'd escorted her halfway back to her cousin's house.
"I'm really glad you like it!" I said. "You seem kind of homesick off and on but I think you'll settle in perfectly, and you'll get healthier and you'll be able to do whatever you want."
Something about that seemed to hit her sourly. She turned her face away from me before I could do much analysis. "Sure."
"You know," I remarked, after a silence, "you can just say when you're trying not to Santa me, instead of making things up."
"I think that'd make it pretty obvious."
"You're already kinda obvious," I said. "I can tell when you're thinking about Santa."
"All right. I will settle in, and I'll get healthier, and then I will be able to do whatever I want, except become Santa. Happy?"
I was, if only because that sounded ridiculous enough to make me laugh. We rolled up to Ron's house. I put the dog cart away and got Bert situated where he belonged overnight, and Amy let herself in.
"See you tomorrow?"
"Uh, sure?"
"Will I see you at school or are you not starting yet?"
"Not yet," she said. "I'd screw up and tell everybody the true meaning of Christmas. Besides, I'm a little ahead on some stuff, mostly I need to catch up on things like being able to walk."
"That makes sense. I can skip part of track to come hang out," I said. "You haven't seen the half of Hollow Grove yet. I'll show you all the cool places in town."
The next day I had school, of course. Everyone needed to learn to read and add, and it was also a lot more rewarding to play music or paint pictures if you knew what you were doing, so there were classes in those. School was also the natural point to form sports teams like my track group or the swimmers or whatever. I was also taking a course on dog training. I didn't have my own dog, but the family dog had died not too long before and I was thinking about getting a puppy. Some things didn't meet all year round, and I'd finished my short course on how to build a campfire and the one on keeping honeybees. I hadn't completely gotten over my nervousness about bees, but it had helped a lot. I didn't feel called to a serious career, so I wasn't taking the complicated classes for future doctors or future Enrichment Committee members or future teachers.
After going through all my bread and butter and cheese for lunch, I ran through the track warmups, took two laps around the field, and then told Coach I was going to pick up Amy and show her around some more. I took off running.
I loved the feeling of grass beneath my feet. Some kids were music types who lived for drumbeats, some were all about making watercolors do crazy things, but I was a track girl through and through even if my track was the route to Plum Orchard. I jogged to a halt feeling like I could run a four-minute mile. How quickly, I wondered, would Amy be better at walking? Was she going to the doctor every day to get pills or something to make her stronger? Did her cousin Ron remind her to practice walking around when she was at home?
She'd get lots of practice with me. I collected her and the dog cart same as before and we went into town. She picked up her new clothes, finished since we'd been there the day before, and petted the mesh bag absently with one hand while I walked her to the dance hall, and the amphitheater, and the dog park. We left Bert at the dog park, chasing varmints like nobody'd ever taught him not to, but at least there was no risk he'd catch one. I'd planned a route that would let her sit down and take a break between short bursts of walking for the rest of the tour. Near the dog park was the omelette restaurant, but she'd had lunch - apparently Ron made stew most days - and the grocery store.
Amy wanted to see everything in the grocery store. She had this weird furrowed-brow look on her face the whole time. I didn't know what she was expecting. There was meat and fish, which she knew existed because we'd had the cookout. There were vegetables, the kind that didn't just grow everywhere conveniently; that couldn't be a surprise because her cousin had made stew. There was flour, for bread, and butter, to put on it, along with cheese and cream and milk and yogurt and eggs. The kinds of nuts that were better roasted, the kinds of fruits that were out of season and offered dried or frozen and the kinds of veggies that made good pickles in their jars. Spices and salt. Lentils and beans. Vanilla and cocoa. What was Amy looking for that she couldn't find?
She stopped at the vanilla, bags of long wrinkly beans right next to the cardamom pods. "This," she said, pointing it out. "What do you do with it?"
"Me personally or like in general?"
"Both, what is it - for, in Hollow Grove."
"I like it in raspberry compote - you cook the raspberries down and strain out the seeds and put in the inside goop from the vanilla bean and then you put it in yogurt. My mom likes it in hot milk with honey -"
"Honey! Okay, where's the honey?" said Amy, lighting up.
"- it's not here," I laughed. "Same way there aren't, oh, fresh blueberries. You don't go to the store to find it if you want it!"
"From... bees?" said Amy, grimacing. "You have to do it yourself, the store won't do it for you?"
"Honey keeps really well and it comes out of the hive pretty much ready to eat. It isn't like there's a ton of steps you can't do at home, you can put a hive wherever's convenient and save the honey no problem. The grocery store is for, like, if you grew a ton of wheat, it'd take up more space than a whole neighborhood, and it has to be cut and dried and milled, and the store means you don't have to do that. But if you could just pick a loaf of bread off a tree the store wouldn't have flour at all!"
"What if you don't know how to make bread?" Amy asked.
"It's... not really hard? You could learn in like a day."
"What if you hate making bread, then."
"Then you get some from a friend and you make them smoothies or you weed their carrots something, I guess? That's not more of a hassle than making extra trips to the store."
She looked up and down the aisle, again, searching for - something. Did Santa Claus distribute bread in Tintown? Every guess I came up with was stupider than the last.
She either found what she was looking for, or didn't, and closed her eyes and sighed. "Okay. So there's honey but you have to get it from the bees or from friends who have bees."
"I have bees, if you want a jar of honey! I took a class on beekeeping."
"...yeah. Uh, I might want kind of a lot of honey."
"Well, I don't have a lot of hives, but I can get you a pretty decent sized jar," I assured her. "Do you really just get it at the store in Tintown? That's so funny, is that how you get fruit too?"
She hesitated. For a long time. Then she said, "Usually, it's from Santa," and the tension eased a little, and we laughed.
After walking through the grocery store Amy needed to sit down for a while. We found an apple tree and I climbed up to get an apple for each of us and we sat in the shade eating them. Her eyebrows went way up when she first bit into it, like she'd never had an apple before. For just a second she looked perfectly happy.
Then a varmint skittered over her ankle to disappear into a burrow and she shrieked and dropped the fruit on the ground and pulled her leg toward herself to scratch at it furiously, as though the six little feet had rendered the top layer of her skin unfit for purpose and she had to get it all under her fingernails instantly.
"Amy," I said. "Amy, it's okay, they won't hurt you - I can get you another apple - don't, you'll hurt yourself, Amy -"
She stopped scratching, but she'd started crying in the meantime, curled up on herself like her dog had died. I leaned over and hugged her tight. It would have been politer to ask, since I hadn't known her long, but I never saw anybody need a hug that badly. At least she didn't flinch or yell at me. She cried harder and leaned against my arm and shook like a campfire in the wind. People going in and out of the grocery store kept stopping to check on us and I waved them off with my other hand so they wouldn't interrupt Amy dealing with her feelings about - Santa, varmints, apples, homesickness - I didn't know what.
Eventually she stood up, very suddenly, and I sprang to my feet, ready to meet her wherever she wanted to go. She pointed in a random direction. "What's THAT," she said, as stilted as a six-year-old in a school play, but I played along.
"That's the art supply depot! Do you paint, or sculpt, or anything?" I asked. "Not that you have to for it to be a good stop, some people just like going through the bins of pretty rocks and buttons, and looking at canvases other people painted on and decided they didn't want, and collecting their favorites. If you wanted to make your own clothes that's where you'd go for that too, there's yarn and dye and everything."
Amy forged off toward the art supply depot without answering me, and I trotted just at her heel, worried she was overexerting herself and whatever the doctors had done wouldn't sustain her this far and I'd have to catch her and carry her to the dogcart. But she made it to the building and in through the doors and there distracted herself until she was smiling again, in the aisle full of dried branches and grasses for arranging with cut flowers.
I led her through the art supply store, and afterwards we found a place to sit with peaches and relatively fewer varmints, though she kept her feet tucked close to herself. After that I'd planned to take her to the swimming pond, and the woods up in the hills, but mulling on it over my peach, I changed my mind: she needed to be away from the varmints altogether for a little while, and you can only do that indoors. (They couldn't swim, but they did glide over the water quite well.)
So I took her to the library. She reacted to it a lot like the grocery store, hunting and hunting for something that wasn't there, finally asking me something about whether all our letters were shaped this way and whether there was a section specifically about things that happened a long time ago, no, longer ago than that. But eventually I pulled her away from the section on knitting patterns before they made her start crying again, and brought her up the stairs to the reading nooks.
The reading nooks were very small; each had just one beanbag or chair, and a window, and a little end table. Some people found them claustrophobic. I did too, sometimes. But if you want to get all the varmints out of a place, it has to be pretty small, because varmints are pretty small. If you have a shelf, they'll be on top of it; if you have a pile of things they'll be behind it. In a reading nook, I could pick up the beanbag and shake it, look at the baseboards and the windowsill, feel around the underside of the little table, be sure none were clinging to our clothes or the light fixture - and then shut the door.
Amy was holding a baking book in both hands, watching me in puzzlement. "Kelly?" she said. "What are you doing?"
"I think you need to not see a varmint for the next while and this was the best place I could think of to get completely for sure varmint-free," I said. "The reading rooms don't have dog doors."
"Oh." She sat on the beanbag, then scooted over so there was room for me, and when I didn't sit down right away she waved me down next to her. "Thank you. I'll probably get used to them, but..."
"If the climate's not right for them in Tintown I bet it'd be a little much coming here, they get everywhere!" I said.
"Yeah." Amy laughed shakily. "They really... really do. I just... this seems like a nice place to live in most ways but I hate them -"
I knew people who were afraid of spiders and people who got jumpy around larger dogs. I knew people who were nervous about heights, and going to the doctor, and thunderstorms.
Amy didn't talk like that. She might be scared of them, but she was also angry at them. Angry at varmints. It didn't make sense to be angry at a dumb animal like that.
Which could have just been Amy being weird except -
Sometimes my dad seemed angry at them, too. He was fed up with them, he wanted them out of his house and kept shooing them no matter how many times they came back in. He was never scared - but he was angry.
"Something about Santa makes people mad at varmints," I muttered. "I bet I'll feel real stupid when I hear it for real, I bet it'll feel like it should've been obvious."
"I don't think it is, actually," said Amy, after a silence. "I think I would've thought before it'd be obvious. But now I've been here a few days - it's not at all, I think, if you grow up in Hollow Grove."
"Well, I guess that makes me feel better."
We sat there squashed shoulder to shoulder by the contours of the beanbag for a while. It could have been ten minutes or forty. And finally Amy got up.
"I can walk now," she said. "Let's go. I didn't move to Hollow Grove to be scared into a library by stupid varmints."
So I stood up too, and we finished the tour I'd planned out and then took the dogcart back to her cousin Ron's.
After about a week Amy was used to walking enough that she didn't need the cart, and could go from the Plum Grove to the town center, or even to a farther neighborhood, without needing a rest on the way. She had terrible balance if she tried to run, and she'd crash into things or stumble, but she could walk. It made it easier to take her places. Instead of just the center of town with all its benches and picnic tables I could bring her on gentle little hikes.
"Did you have a cart or something back in Tintown?" I asked, unpacking our lunch at the top of Silver Cascade.
"Something," she said. "Not with a dog. Hardly anybody has a dog as a pet there, I'd seen them before but only in zoos. I mean, uh, in - where they were - on display, not like -"
"Dogs in zoos! What an idea - do you want to see the zoo, today? It's a lot of walking but maybe you're up for it now."
She stared at me. "You have a zoo?"
"Why wouldn't we have a zoo?" I asked. "Not everything lives in the wild around here. There's penguins, and bears, and rats, and snakes, and stuff like that."
Amy was still staring at me. "I wasn't expecting Hollow Grove to have its own zoo."
"You didn't seem surprised about the... playground, or the library, or the -"
"No, I - those things I expected, even if I didn't know just what they'd be like."
"But you didn't expect us to have a zoo at all," I said, bewildered.
"Never mind. I'd love to see it," said Amy.
I hesitated for a minute before deciding that this was probably more Santa nonsense. I led her to the gate that let visitors in to the zoo, through the high wall that would keep an escape artist creature inside, explaining as I went: "They give all the flighted birds their own tags, so they can find them if they get out. One time a heron escaped and that was how they got it, though I think it hurt itself getting trapped in somebody's kitchen, first. But if a snake gets out they'd rather it not have a chance to get that far, it would be hard to tag a snake."
"You could give it a chip. Under the skin," said Amy distantly.
"I guess you could, but it seems like it'd scare the snake, wouldn't it? Maybe they do it with the bears, those they can train to hold still for vet checkups and they could put in a chip then." The exhibit closest to the entrance was the penguins, who might be easy to tag but couldn't fly away. There was a placard up, and the zookeeper waved at us from where she was giving the birds their smelly fishy lunch. When we were done with the penguins we saw the meerkats, and went through the dark building full of bats, and swung through the aquarium section, and -
"No," said Amy, looking at the petting zoo.
"I guess we're a little too old for it," I said, but she was making that face again.
"Yeah."
I let her get away with the excuse. We moved on to the monkeys, the waterfowl all together in their pond, the elephants. They gave the elephants art supplies, and one was painting. It was cute, though the picture didn't look like much.
We'd coincided with a whole group of schoolkids, and met them at the elephant enclosure. "Elephants are very smart animals!" said their tour leader. "A snake can be happy all alone eating already-dead mice in a box that's the right temperature. Not an elephant! An elephant needs friends and activities. A wild elephant wouldn't have paint, of course, but they're smart enough to adapt to the kinds of hobbies we can offer them here in the zoo. And they need elephant friends, but they like humans, too. Actually, elephants think we're cute!"
I looked at Amy.
Her gaze was locked on the tour leader. His attention was on the kids - but he glanced our way for a moment - saw Amy, saw me - winced, a tiny fraction of a microexpression that I would have missed if I hadn't been watching so closely.
A varmint ran along the top of the fence that separated the visitors from the elephants.
I knew who Santa Claus was.
We were back in the library, to the reading room, a space so featureless that you could be sure no little critters were watching from any hidden nooks. It didn't have enough room to pace and I was doing it anyway.
"Okay, so what's the honey about?" I asked, turning around and around in the tiny room so quickly I was getting dizzy.
"They're not letting you have sugar any other way," said Amy. "And you have to get the honey from the bees. We'll sometimes be out of everything for a week and have to live on what we have in the pantry till a new shipment comes in, but some of what we buy is sugar and it's hard, to give it up."
"You said 'we'," I said, finally giving up on pacing and sitting on the floor instead. I straightened my legs out - they just barely fit in the width of the room - and touched my toes, trying to stretch away the tension all through my body.
"...I know I can't go back but I did grow up there."
"Why can't you go back?" I asked, giving up on the stretch to throw up my hands. "Why shouldn't you come here, get your legs fixed, and turn right around, if that's what you'd rather?"
"I could... but then nobody else could. That's not what they're about. The varmints." She spat the word. "I could go insist on being released into the wild right now and then next time somebody needed to come to Hollow Grove they'd say, nope, you're a wild human and you're going to die of fume rot like a wild human, or you're going to stay blind from that workshop accident like a wild human, Hollow Grove is not for the wild humans and our experimental program demonstrated that wild humans under these conditions don't adapt well. They're not a charity."
If I wasn't a wild human, what was I - I knew the answer, but I couldn't think it straight on, not yet. "What's a charity?"
"A - giving people stuff just to be nice. Tintown's hanging on, trading with any species who want anything we can do, and then there's Hollow Grove, doing the thing they really want, trading for things we can't afford, and you don't even know it."
"The adults know it."
"Yeah."
"I think my sister almost left."
"Could be."
If Rachel had left I'd have thought she just wanted to move to Tintown for - I didn't know what reason I would have invented. A boy. The climate. Career ambitions. And then I would have found out at the appointed time who Santa was, where all our Christmas presents came from, what was maintaining the plants and the stores and the clinic and the mountains all around all sides of the valley that held Hollow Grove.
"So in the library you were looking for..."
"There's probably a basement," sighed Amy. "For grownups. Most people in Hollow Grove know all about it. I was wasting time looking in the shelves you were able to show me."
I let a silence hang for a moment. Then: "You wanted to see if we had books about things that happened a long time ago."
"Yeah. - it wasn't the varmints," she said. "I hate them but it wasn't them. They didn't help during the - the war, do you know what a war is - but they swooped in to save all the species and they let all the humans left decide, if they wanted to be - wild, still, without anyone protecting them and taking care of them, except they're making sure no one destroys the planet because Hollow Grove is on it."
The window out of the reading room was half-obscured by a cherry tree, an everbearing variety that always had a bunch of ripe ones even as flowers bloomed and leaves shivered in the wind. Beyond that I could see the mountains. People hiked in them. It was allowed. There were waterfalls and stuff. And probably one of the times I'd gone to the doctor as a little girl they'd tucked a tracker under my skin, so if I grew up to become a very accomplished mountain climber, they'd be able to find me on the other side and bring me home before I, a stupid zoo-bred lost bird, could wedge into a varmint's oven trying to eat its dinner and burn myself.
"Do they talk?" I asked. It was an absurd image, like a five-year-old's playdate with a sockpuppet, a varmint talking -
"Not out loud and not to us."
"To who?"
"Each other. They can just think at each other, they're doing it all the time. They can write. They've gotten better at - pretending like they're people, when they write? But if you read their first attempts it's so offputting it's funny..."
I thought vaguely that I should be asking who did "do it". Who it was that made it so all the species, humans and elephants and cherry trees alike, needed rescuing. But I didn't actually want to and I didn't actually have to and Amy wasn't bringing it up. So I let it lie. On another day, I could learn who it was, who'd reduced us from some previous height of wild untamed civilization, to this. "Is it nice," I said. "Being wild."
There was a very long silence. Then Amy said, "I think maybe the only nice thing about being wild is knowing that you're wild. It probably used to be nicer. Before. But I'm not even sure about that."
"But it's nice to know? That you're wild?"
I almost thought she wouldn't answer me, she thought so long about that one. She was staring at the cherry tree, the flowers and the ripening fruit and the green curves of the leaves.
Finally she said, "It is if you're angry. If you're angry it's the best thing. If you're really, really angry, it's better than having a dog or apples or paint or legs that work. I didn't have all that much being angry in me."
We sat there, watching the branch quiver and the sun lean west into a pool of color.
"If I stepped on a varmint," I said, "what would happen?"
"Nothing. You won't catch one and if you did they wouldn't care. It'd be like getting a teeny, tiny scratch on your leg, losing one varmint out of the whole mess of them."
I took Amy to the cookout like usual and we had lamb chops and corn on the cob and grilled mushrooms covered in herbs that my dad ground up into a pasty goop. She went home. She didn't need me to escort her places any more.
I helped scrub char off the grill, as it cooled off after the last food was plated. My dad went around collecting plates full of bones and cobs and skewers.
"You all right, Kelly?" he asked.
I scrubbed. They'd known, right? Everybody had known when I made friends with a transfer student that she might Santa me. It was an accepted risk.
I looked around to make sure the kids were all inside. I waited till the Feng twins were past their threshold, on their way to bed; I watched a varmint slip through after the door closed behind them, through the swinging dog flap. The Fengs did have a dog, trained to let itself out and fertilize a grape vine whenever it needed to, but it was obvious, now, that that wasn't the real reason all our houses were designed to let smaller animals in. When I looked around again the faint glow of the vineyard lights winking down from the tops of all the trellises revealed no more children. I didn't count.
"Amy and I went to the zoo today," I said. My dad was pretty smart. He'd figure it out. But just in case he wasn't sure, wasn't allowed to talk to me freely without being surer: "I discovered the true meaning of Christmas."
He snorted. Touched his eye like he'd gotten a fleck of something in it. "Oh, just you wait till you actually learn the true meaning of Christmas. They won't let us have churches."
I didn't know what a church was. I intended to put off finding out. "When you decided," I said. "It wouldn't have been too long ago, would it, for you to have decided -?"
"Your mother was already pregnant with Rachel," he said, not making me finish formulating the question. "I sort of thought... that we'd go, after we had her, after we had you, after we were done having children."
"You didn't."
"Your mother wasn't as conflicted as I was. She was all for Hollow Grove right away. Not instead of Tintown, but with both of them established she knew which one she wanted to be in. We kept putting off even talking seriously about it. She said, they don't have disposable diapers there, or anything to fix it quick if one of the girls breaks an arm. And then it was, look how much Kelly loves applesauce, look how much Rachel loves swimming, Kelly's going to be so tall if we let her, Rachel's friends are all here... our friends were all here, too, by then."
He patted my shoulder and walked me back to the house. I followed him, watching varmints' shadows against the sky as they glided to and fro on their inscrutable errands. We went inside. He reached for the broom, then dropped his arm and sighed. There were varmints in the house and they'd leave when they left and they'd be replaced with more. It didn't matter. They acted like dumb animals and it didn't matter, if they heard us, what they thought - anything short of what they'd consider grounds to release us into the wild, and I trusted my dad to know.
"You were..." He shook his head and went to fall into a chair in the living room. "Kelly, you were so safe and happy, you were so healthy. They're good at that. I had a little brother and he was crying, all the time, when he was a baby - gas pain, teething, noises you've never heard in your life keeping him up when he was sleepy. And you just didn't. They didn't think those particular privations were going to help you be a fully well-rounded human so you didn't have them... you played outside with your friends and got blueberries in your hair, because we never had a chance to put you in front of a television with a soda and get you hooked on it...
"And I looked into leaving anyway, once," he added, voice lower. "And it turned out it didn't matter. I couldn't have taken you girls with me. Even if your mother had come too. They were harder to communicate with back then and I'd thought - they said we could go wild any time we felt ready for the unbuffered world. I thought obviously with our kids. They didn't mean it that way."
I thought about him sweeping varmints off the dining table and shooing them out the dog door. "Do you wish you'd understood the rules before Rachel was born? Would we have been born in Tintown then?"
"No." The answer came quickly. "Your mother would have sooner left me. Maybe I could've withstood it, risking your - your health and safety, to join the last free human beings, maybe I would've talked myself into it, but she wouldn't, not if there was any other way, not unless she was the last fertile woman on Earth, and she wasn't. So in the end it didn't make any difference, all our postponed arguments. This was the only place you could've been born, kiddo."
We always kept a chessboard on the coffee table, reset to starting position every time someone finished a game. I was sitting closer to white. I moved a pawn, silently, and we finished out a distracted chess match without speaking further. A varmint sat behind my dad on the back of the couch, another one on the bookshelf, one clinging to the molding around the doorframe that led to the kitchen. They were listening. They probably understood some of what we were saying, even if there was a lot of detail lost on them. They'd been there all my life and it had never been possible for me to grow up without them.
I could leave. I knew how, I knew who I'd talk to now that I knew what I'd be talking to them about, it was obvious that I'd go to the Enrichment Committee. I could leave all this behind forever and see what Tintown was like, and try sugar that didn't come from honey, and never have a varmint follow me into my room again.
My dad checkmated me. I hugged him, and I went outside to look up at the moon. It was full, showing off the great scar-line across its face and all its craters in glowing detail.
It gave me enough light to run.
I could see the outlines of buildings and trees, loosely, enough to know where I was going. I could not see the ground, or my own feet, only feel the grass and moss and dirt where my heels struck the ground and my toes dug in to push off. I didn't need to. The paths between the grapes had nothing worse than leaves and grape-stems among them; the streets were plush and flat and free of stones and roots. I ran till the wind whistled in my ears and my chest heaved and my eyes streamed from the night air.
I ran as fast as I could, but I never managed to step on a varmint.